This Life, This Existence
by TheVelvetDusk
Summary: "He has to stay here. With her. He only knows his name when she says it." {post-series oneshot ; the lyattverse is my ride or die}


_A/N: sooo there was a day this week that I sat down & opened google docs with the express intention of working on Count Up All The Chances, but my brain said no and insisted on doing this instead. Super freaking random oneshot, don't know where it came from, but it's here nonetheless. This is a post-canon/post-series work of the lyattverse. _

* * *

He's flat on his back the first time she appears. Light floods the spaces around her, peeks through curtains of her hair, almost washes out the illusion of her fair-skinned face. He doesn't know her. She's distantly beautiful, like a painting or a relic. A mystery belonging to a lost civilization, a mirage in soft pastels, except there's a darkness to her too. It goes beyond the shade of her hair and the caramel abyss of her gaze. It's something inside of her. Something she carries, an intelligence both heavy and inescapable.

He swears he feels her fingertips on his forehead, but then he's afloat on another current, one that takes him away from her. She's meant to remain unknown, a ghost of another life.

It's the same bright light next time. There's a hum between his ears. It hurts to open his eyes, but he doesn't accept defeat. He blinks again and then she's there.

Her dark hair is swept up, twisted off of her face and away from her neck. He wishes he could touch her there, on that long arc of white skin, but keeping her in his field of vision proves to be more of a challenge than he can handle. Moving his arm is beyond question.

She speaks, words that soak against his skin but can't permeate his skull. He watches her lips move in a haze. Her big eyes fill with tears. One of them falls to the ravine of his collarbone, jolting him into heightened awareness. He...he _felt_ that.

Her lips move faster, but there's still no sound. He's desperate to fix it, to make her stop crying, to find the damn remote control so he can unmute the program before she leaves him again.

It's hopeless. His eyelids collapse and refuse to open again.

A hand in his hair. That's the initial tug to the surface. It feels so damn good that he might just melt away into another river of unconsciousness. But then he remembers the earlier hallucination of a beautiful woman and he concentrates harder. Pins all of his energy on isolating each stroke of those soothing fingers against his scalp until it's real and tangible and vital. He can't be imagining it. He needs it to be real.

The light around her is dimmer than before. It smudges shadows against her nose, paints trenches beneath her eyes. He sees the ribbon of excitement in her gaze as his eyes remain steady on hers. Her hand stops moving, but she doesn't pull away. Instead, she cradles his head against her palm and he knows he's as secure as a child who's been found, brought home, wrapped up and embraced, cherished.

She says his name. He's sure of it even though it seems so far off. She has a low voice, a voice that lulls him into tranquil waters but also bounces him into realization.

He's heard that voice before.

The recognition is as forceful as it is ephemeral. He feels frantic with a need to grab ahold of her, to beat back the same sequence of short-lived cognizance that eventually fades into nothing. He has to stay here. With her. He only knows his name when she says it.

There's moisture against his eyelashes as he loses strength again. He tries to say he's sorry. It's hell to be left alone, and he's sure she knows that just as well as he does. He wants to tell her he'll be back, but he really has no idea if that's true.

She's not there when he returns. Not as someone prods his side. Not when a grisly voice asks him his name, his birthday, his rank. She's not there, and he doesn't know any of the answers. He closes his eyes and wishes for the gray mist to fold over him once more.

And then she's back and she's in profile. A swirl of pink and blue scenery highlights her chin, her nose, her brow. There's a tinge of orange reflecting over her hair. She has a book in her hands. That somehow seems right to him. A goddess of light and knowledge. Untouchable in her wisdom. As clever as she is alluring.

He makes a garbled noise that strikes a sharp pain in his chest. The disturbance seizes her whole body. Her book tumbles from her hands, and though his eyes can't move with it, he's certain he hears the clap of it hitting the floor. She's backlit now as she turns to face him, and he suffers a great loss when he realizes her expression is now veiled in darkness. Something dips against his ribs. She's closer. Next to him. Her lower lip sputters. She whispers a sodden greeting.

He smiles. He's sure his mouth has lifted. Maybe it's lifted right off his face, because he feels like a plane trembling off a runway at top speed. He's never fallen in love so fast. Not even with a pale apparition like her. There's no logic to how much he needs her, this quiet, curious, vapor of a woman. It makes him wonder if he has a fracture in his cranium or an illness of the mind.

She smooths her hand over his chest. Tells him he's okay. Tells him she missed him. Tells him he's brave and stupid. She laughs a little over that, and he wants to laugh with her. Stupid has never sounded as kind and admirable as it does on her lips.

When he closes his eyes this time, he can still feel her hand against his heart. It stays with him as he sinks into his usual trance. It's not as scary, leaving this time. She'll be back to haunt him again. Eyes full of soul, full of promise. Eyes that linger even as foggy dreams consume him.

She's talking to someone else when he joins her again. Her hands wring together from a corner of the room that's too distant for his liking. _Closer_ , he silently begs. He needs her closer.

He's sure that days have passed by the time his wish is granted. She skims her fingers through the whiskers at his jaw and says she'll be back soon.

Soon. He has no idea when soon is. Soon cannot possibly be soon enough.

There's someone else with her when soon arrives. He's instantly jealous of her companion. The other man has an arm across her tapered shoulders. Her head rests against him. Her eyes are closed. She's breathing slowly with a soft inflating of her chest, a gentle decline as she exhales.

She's sleeping. He wonders why he's never seen her sleep before, and yet...he has, hasn't he? There's a serene shape to her mouth that nips at his memory. Her black eyelashes are a sharp contrast against the chalky skin of her cheek, and he's thought about that before. Studied the distinct variation between light and dark that's visible every time she's at rest like that. He's kissed her awake before, hasn't he? Nudged his face to hers until those same lashes lift to flicker over his cheekbone.

Who the hell is this woman?

The man who holds her against him is saying something. He keeps glancing at the woman's slack face with nervous brown eyes, troubled with...with the dilemma of whether or not he should wake her.

 _Let her sleep_. That's the right answer. It's a trumpeting instinct, a bellow of innate decisiveness from deep within that says she never gets enough sleep. She'll be awake soon enough. Let her sleep, Rufus.

 _Rufus_.

How - where did that…

The thought abandons him before he can catch it by its tail.

And then he's sleeping too, even though sleep is all he seems to be good at, unlike the nameless guardian angel who rarely closes her eyes.

A methodical pressure runs up and down his face. There's a clink, a splash, and then he feels it again. A movement against his cheek. And again. Clink, splash. Scrape.

The pattern is broken with a blustering hiss. "Crap. I - _dammit_ , I knew this wouldn't go well."

There's a different press of something at his chin. Fabric, maybe. Cottony gauze.

"Stop bleeding. Please stop bleeding. _Shit_."

He can't open his eyes, but he knows it's her. She's either laughing or crying. That's her breath glancing off of his jaw, her nearness intoxicating his senses.

"I'm sorry," she whispers. "World-class klutz, at your service. Not that you don't already know that. You'd actually think this was hilarious if you - hell, you'd be laughing your ass off just to see me with this razor in my hand. Or more accurately, you'd be taking it _out_ of my hand before I could hurt myself with it."

Now she's definitely crying. And yet he hears the grin that laces those tears. He wishes with all his might to look at her, to tell her she's wasting her sadness on him, to - to…

To _remember_ her.

He thinks he can get himself together in time to freeze this moment, to see her while she's right there before him, but when his eyes finally get on board with that plan, she isn't there anymore.

He flexes a fist in frustration, and a second later, he knows that's new. A fist flexed turns into a hand raised. He manages to trace the pad of his thumb against his face. It's perfectly smooth. Not a single fleck of stubble. His arm is suddenly thousands of pounds, crashing downward again after no more than a second or two of exertion.

There was a time before this, another place, a purpose. He had no sink there, no razor, no...no comfort, no bed, no real bathroom. She hadn't been there with him. He had something, some piece of her, a photograph maybe, but that was it.

His last thought is that he hasn't shaved in an eternity. There was no shaving wherever it was that he came from, so she's real. She must be real. She's real, real, real. There's no other answer.

She sits at the end of the bed some time later with a stack of papers on her knees. A pen in hand. She frowns down at what she's reading, scribbles a few marks, frowns again. She flips back and forth between one page and the next, shakes her head, then writes a stark letter across the top of that paper and tosses it to the floor before starting again on the next one.

The cycle continues. Three more have hit the floor before she gets to one that makes her smile. She nods down at her lap. Barely touches her pen to the page till the very end, then writes and writes for several moments, her smile uninterrupted. She kicks a foot in delight once she's finished. The happiness is so pure, so unspoiled, that he feels an odd lurch in his chest as he observes it. That paper gets placed gently to the floor. Reverently. He has no doubt about the grade scrawled in the margin of that essay. One very lucky student is getting an A.

His head tilts sideways against his pillow. The beginnings of a smirk spread to one side of his face. It doesn't even occur to him that those inferences came from somewhere important, somewhere forgotten. This sketch of a woman is gradually filling out into a fuller picture, but he's too content to make any effort at studying the image that's emerging. Her smile has settled into his crater of a mind and that's enough for now.

But when he's aware of her next, she has no smile. No light at all. The room is so dark that he can barely make her out, but he can hear her, and she's arguing with someone. Her cell phone is jerked out of her hand. She's not cancelling her trip. They're telling her to go. She needs this break. She needs a few days away from this place. The voice - no, voices - are insistent. She's going. It's important. It's not that long. Everything will be fine, they'll be here every day. She deserves this.

 _No_. He feels like he's screaming, but the three of them go on without pause. A man and a woman force her into a hug, tell her to get going, the cab is already waiting, on and on they go. She's usually the best debater he knows, but she's losing this one. He feels her defeat burning inside of him like it's his own. Maybe it is his own. _No_.

Her lips slope over his forehead. She breathes life against his mouth. Not for the first time, her tears wet his cheek. "I love you, sweetheart."

She's going.

She's got a jacket wrapped around her thin frame, a shaking hand parting her glossy hair, but he needs to tell her - tell her…

Goddammit, he needs to tell her something, but she has a bag up to her shoulder and the man from before - the man who sits with her sometimes - is herding her out the door. They both pull her in for one last squeeze, and he's so damn envious that they get to touch her like that when he's relegated to this worthless existence. No voice, no working set of hands, feet that ignore his commands, no control at all.

She's gone.

His head droops. He has no intention of wasting his limited reserve of energy on the two people who sent her away. Just as he's almost slipped back into wherever it is he goes to hide, the message he meant to deliver blazes through his mind.

 _I love you too_ , _babydoll_.

If he wakes and she's not there, he rolls his head to the side and pretends to be absent. Things happen around him, voices both known and unknown speak overhead, but it's pointless without her. The guy who pushed her through the door tries to connect with him over and over again, asking a series of bizarre questions, telling stories that quicken his pulse with their echo of familiarity. He talks about time travel, the Alamo and Ian Fleming and Wendell Scott, good versus evil, teammates that became family; but the stories only make him angry. All they do is remind him of _her_ , and she's not back, so he doesn't give a damn. It's no good to be reminded of her when she's so far out of reach.

For the first time in what he assumes is a long time, he desperately wishes for sleep. Alertness is nothing but a punishment.

It goes on like that until the curse is abruptly lifted.

She's returned. He knows it before he's able to lift his eyes. Knows it even if he hasn't heard a word from her yet. It's as if the entire room has reshaped itself all around him. An added twinkle of anticipation saturates the atmosphere. There's a smell of books and perfume, a sweetness once tasted, an exhilarating zip of fresh air and fragrant tea.

She's here. Oh god, she's finally here.

One look at her and he's falling through a disorienting blur of color and thought. Did he really let himself believe she's human? Common flesh and blood? As normal and breakable and fallible as any of the other placeholders who've buzzed in and out of the spot she now occupies - the spot that should hold no one but her? Impossible.

He gets that same impression as he did the first time he saw her here. She's a phantom presence, some sort of holy artifact of an era gone by, a gentle whisper in a world that's too loud and bright and ordinary to ever contain her inside of its limits.

Tender emotion weighs in her eyes. Her smile is unbalanced with self-reproach. "Hi, Wyatt. I...I brought you something."

She draws his arm into her lap. Folds a cool piece of metal into his palm, inhaling sharply as his fingers automatically close around the object.

"It's - it's silly, I know, but I was at this conference in Reno, and - and wouldn't you know, my hotel was basically right across the street from the National Automobile Museum. As if I wasn't already…" she trails off, shakes her head, stares down at his hand which still rests in hers. "I missed you so much. No more conferences, okay? No travel, no leaving. This is where I belong."

She brought him a car. A little model car, red and shiny and perfectly scaled although it's no longer than his index finger.

Because cars remind her of him. Maybe because they've been squished together inside of one before, in another lifetime. Or probably just because he loves old cars. He'd been eyeing one before he left, a '78 Trans Am that would have eaten all the money right out of his wallet. She'd teased him about it, told him to find his own garage for that sickly rust trap, because it sure as hell wasn't coughing up its last breath in hers.

She was always saying ridiculous things like that, as if they didn't both own that garage. Well, him, her, and the USAA Federal Savings Bank. He'd swept her off her feet in that garage, hauled her around to the front of the house and paraded her right through her handpicked antique door, just so that he could say that he followed tradition to the letter - no matter how much she pretended to object, his wife was being carried over the threshold on night one of their marriage. He'd started kissing her before the door was even shut, kept on kissing her in the foyer, in the kitchen, up the stairs. Unbuttoned a whole parade of tiny pearl buttons as soon as they reached the bedroom. Watched in awe as the ivory gown slipped away from her shoulders. He made sure that they'd christened that house rigorously, exhaustively, as _theirs_.

They damn well deserved it, after all. Kicking ass. Saving the world. It was over. Finally, finally over. And their time had come. No more missions. No more ghosts. No more secrecy. Just happiness. Long nights that bled into even longer mornings. A warm cocoon of domesticity. Lazy, radiating freedom.

Until he was eventually called away from her. Until he kissed tear after tear from her cheeks as she bid him goodbye right in front of that same garage - the one that still didn't have a Trans Am inside of it, because when Lucy Preston says no, she means no.

"I should have told you to buy that car," she says now, practically weeping in front of him in the pallor of his hospital room. "That's all I could think about once you were gone. I stared at that stupid empty garage and regretted it every damn day. So this - this..."

She gestures weakly at the tiny replica in his hand. "Consider this my promise. When you're ready to take on a new project, _any_ project, that's your golden ticket, okay? You can make the world's biggest mess, get oil stains everywhere, hell, I don't care if you park the damn thing in the middle of the front lawn. To hell with the homeowners association, right?"

"We don't have a homeowners association, Luce."

"Yeah, you're right, that was the other place we - " her spine stiffened as her hand flew to her mouth, brown eyes rounded as wide as they could go. "You - you're _talking_."

He grunted in return, not too convinced that the grueling rumble of sounds he'd emitted actually qualified as real words.

"Wyatt - oh my god, Wyatt!" She staggers to her feet, almost trips over herself, reaches for him then quickly thinks better of it. "Let me get your doctor. I should - yeah, I better - "

He gets a pinky hooked around her finger, but from the triumphant joy in her expression, you would think he'd leaped up from the bed and caught her up in his arms. God, how he wishes that were the case.

"Tell me first. Am I going to die?" he asks hoarsely.

"No," she insists with vehement rebellion surging into her eyes. "Definitely no."

"Am I paralyzed for life? Permanently incapable of eating or drinking or reproducing?"

Her defiance eases into tearful amusement. "No. To all of the above. Your recovery has - well, remarkable is the word they toss around most often."

"Good. The eating and drinking were mostly optional, but that last part…" he's not sure if he's able to waggle his eyebrows at her, but he's sure as hell giving it his best try.

Lucy is lost to a fit of hysteria-driven giggles. It's a laugh he's never heard from her before. One that's born of dizzying relief and terror and love.

He waits till she falls silent, wrapping his pinky finger a little more tightly around hers. "And I'm home, right? I'm not imagining that part?"

She crumples to the side of his mattress in an instant, like her legs simply won't sustain her for another moment. "You're home, Wyatt."

"Thank God. The green-ass recruits they sent me out with were piss poor substitutes for my last team."

Her face wriggles against his neck, sending sparks of contentment straight through him. "Don't you worry. I've already sent several strongly worded letters to the U.S. Army about this, and I'm far from done with them."

He winces into her hair, but half a smirk emerges despite his quick trigger of horror. "Please tell me you're kidding."

"Of course I'm not kidding. We worked together for almost two years and nothing this bad ever happened. You're better than this, I know you are, so it had to have been negligence on their part. And you should have heard the bullshit phone call I got to supposedly explain why you were coming home early. They tell me virtually _nothing_ , then expect me to - "

"Hey, I know it's hard, but it's all part of - "

"No," she retorts, face brimming with pinpricks of a passion he knows so well. "What, it's part of the job? Just goes with the territory? That's not good enough. If this is the mess that I married into, you sure as hell know I won't shy away from informing them of a much-needed organizational overhaul. And god, don't get me started on the hospital they wanted to place you in. Second-rate is being generous, Wyatt."

"Alright, maybe it's time you go get that doctor," he interjects while he still has an opening.

Lucy tucks her lips together, looking just the slightest bit chagrined at her unprompted tirade. "Sick of me already, soldier?"

"No, ma'am. Never." He turns his forehead down to hers, immersing himself in every touch and sigh and nuance that constitutes one very impressive Lucy Preston. Lucy Preston- _Logan_. "Figured it might do you some good to go pace up and down the halls of my very first-rate hospital, though. For your sake, not mine."

She reaches across his chest with a look that's grounded in the fatigue of agonized longing, the same longing that had seeped into every hour of his assignment. Her thumb clicks against the call button and then she's settling back against him once more. "I'll be staying right here. For my sake."

"For my sake, too," he murmurs dreamily. "I was convinced you were an illusion this whole time. A trick of my deluded mind."

"I...I was afraid you didn't know me. Every time you seemed to...to be getting back to normal, there was still this disconnect in your eyes. I just - I wasn't sure that it was really _you_ in there anymore."

He feels the powerful vacuum of fear shaking through her. He doesn't tell her how right - how unfailingly perceptive - she is on that count. Instead he works up all of his remaining stamina until he can sling a weak arm around her back, pledging the one guarantee that's been true from the beginning. "Even if I didn't know you, I'd still _want_ to know you. There's no version of this story that ends differently, okay? It's you and me, always."

She takes his hand, cementing him to this life, this existence. "Always. I'm holding you to that."

Wyatt smiles, knowing full well that she's completely serious when she issues a warning like that one. "Or else I'll get a strongly worded letter?"

"Several of them. Bold font. Many exclamation points."

There she is - real, persistent, far greater than any fragile myth or work of the imagination. He knows her. He loves her. He's always coming home to her. There's actually no such thing as home without her, and no labyrinth, no loss of his internal compass, could ever interfere with the signal that guides his heart back to hers.

* * *

 _reviews are the spice of fanfic life ;)_


End file.
